Israel and Palestine

Sharon's war

Self-defence. And folly too

SO THE Organisation of Islamic States has determined that Palestinian suicide attacks on Israel do not amount to “terrorism”. But how else to describe the murder of a dining-roomful of elderly Jews at their Passover supper in Netanya last week? And this attack, which killed 26 people, was only one of scores of atrocities. Over the past two years, but with mounting intensity since America sent General Anthony Zinni to negotiate a ceasefire, Palestinian “martyrs” sent out from the West Bank have waged a campaign of mass murder against Israeli civilians.

As intended, these attacks have sown terror and destroyed normal life in the Jewish state. Whatever else you think about Ariel Sharon's decision to send his army back into the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, the Israeli prime minister is therefore entitled to call his new campaign a war against terror. America agrees with that view. In a speech on April 4th, George Bush signalled a deeper engagement with the crisis, saying that Colin Powell, the secretary of state, would travel to the region. The president also restated calls for Israeli restraint—while affirming Israel's right to defend itself.

Most Arab leaders, and many European ones, find this self-defence proposition impossible to accept. They are, indeed, outraged by it. At last week's Beirut summit, Arab leaders extended Israel a grudging hand of peace but also voiced admiration (and pledged material support) for the intifada, which they see as a just war whose deserving end—casting off Israel's occupation—justifies the appalling means. Even European governments that are willing to call Palestinian terrorism by its proper name reject Israel's right to make any military reply, least of all by invading territory it signed over to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords.

Thanks, but the liberation battle continues

These governments are in a sort of denial. They see that Mr Arafat remains essential to peacemaking and so refuse to admit what he is up to. Under Oslo, Israel gave up occupied land in return for Mr Arafat's promise to prevent attacks from it. Since the collapse of President Clinton's peacemaking at Camp David, Mr Arafat has reneged on this promise. He probably did not plan the intifada. And it was not possible for his policemen to stop every suicide bombing. But in recent months, blaming Mr Sharon's provocations, they have not seriously tried. Mr Arafat repudiates the occasional atrocity. But when he calls for “a million martyrs” to liberate Jerusalem, the martyrs know what he means. He has, in short, pocketed what Oslo gave him and relaunched a liberation war, hoping that this might deliver the gains that diplomacy failed to. Once he poked Israel hard enough, Israel was bound to snap back.

He has poked; and Israel has snapped. But this does not make Israel's new war wise. Like most military ventures, it will have unlooked-for consequences. It could set alight Israel's border with Lebanon and destabilise Arab countries, such as Egypt and especially Jordan, that have made peace with the Jewish state. It could cause the permanent withdrawal of the peace offer extended at the Beirut summit. And it has already confounded America's hope of Arab support for a renewed attempt to unseat Saddam Hussein.

Beyond this, “Operation Defensive Wall” will almost certainly fail to achieve its declared aims. One is to uproot the Palestinians' terrorist “infrastructure”. But this consists in the main of a supply of bitter men and women willing to kill and be killed on Palestine's behalf; and the bitterness can only grow after Israel's onslaught. Another declared aim is to “isolate” Mr Arafat. But the deadly comedy which Mr Sharon has staged around his old adversary's Ramallah headquarters has had the opposite result. Having lost much lustre for his incompetent administration of the embryonic Palestine, Mr Arafat is suddenly again the beleaguered symbol of his people's aspirations. Whatever Mr Sharon may say, the rest of the world continues to deem him Israel's indispensable interlocutor.

Infrastructure, shminfrastructure

If this war's declared aims are doomed to fail, what about the undeclared ones? The Americans, and the Labour part of Mr Sharon's “unity” cabinet, seem to hope that Israeli military pressure will persuade Mr Arafat to accept the ceasefire terms he has so far refused from General Zinni; and that this will in turn lead, via America's Tenet (security) and Mitchell (confidence-building) plans to the path of negotiation.

A nice idea; but too neat by far. First, far from buckling under Mr Sharon's pressure, Mr Arafat may choose only to harden his conditions for accepting a ceasefire. So far in this intifada, the Palestinians have endured extraordinary hardships, including the loss of lives and livelihoods, without flinching. Mr Arafat cannot easily risk calling a stop with nothing to show for all his people's sacrifices. Besides, Palestinian leaders have calculated all along that Israeli escalation might bring them exactly what they wanted: international peacekeepers, and a leap beyond the gradualism of Oslo to a settlement that pushes Israel all the way back to its pre-1967 borders. The paradox of Mr Sharon's big new war is that it is also Mr Arafat's big new opportunity. He will not wish to squander it.

A second complication is that nobody can be sure of Mr Sharon's true war aims. He certainly has form. As defence minister, and architect of Israel's calamitous Lebanon war of 1982, Mr Sharon proved adept at saying one thing to his cabinet, another to the Americans, and implementing a third policy on the ground. It is all very well for the Americans and his coalition partners to hope that this war will force the Palestinians back to a ceasefire and peace talks. But Mr Sharon is a champion of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and an avowed loather of Oslo. Although George Bush urges him to keep open a “pathway to peace”, Mr Sharon seems intent on making sure that Israel can never again negotiate with Mr Arafat, the “enemy” he publicly regrets sparing in 1982.

Given this, it is no surprise that America has dithered. The fighting has put Mr Bush in a quandary. He is utterly serious about the global war he has declared on terrorism. After atrocities like the one at Netanya, he cannot say that what Israel is fighting is not terrorism. Yet Palestine does not fit the September 11th template. For this is terrorism harnessed to a deserving cause: the independent statehood that America itself has taken pains to say it supports. In principle, Mr Bush could solve his riddle by supporting the end but not the violent means by which the Palestinians have chosen to attain it. In practice, this probably requires working with Mr Arafat, a reformed terrorist returning to former ways. Hence the air of improvisation in American policy. Mr Bush appears to have given Mr Sharon a free hand for a short period, in the desperate hope that a chastened Mr Arafat, whom Israel is under orders to preserve, will thereafter see the error of his ways.

If this is a plan, it is indeed a most desperate one. What if it should fail? Such is the misery of Israelis that Yossi Sarid, Israel's opposition leader, has proposed a previously unthinkable idea: the creation, in the Balkan manner, of some sort of international protectorate for the occupied territories, to restore calm while their ultimate status is resolved. For the present, virtually nobody takes this idea seriously. Mr Sharon would call it a reward for terrorism. Who would dare to supply the troops? In the 1940s, the British mandate in Palestine collapsed in chaos. But the day is coming when there may be no alternative. Except for Jews and Arabs, locked in their eternal embrace, to drown one another in a sea of blood.